1. Technical Field
This invention is directed to telephone terminals and, more particularly, a telephone terminal configurable for accessing features available on the terminal through an interactive display arrangement.
2. Description of the Prior Art
With the advent of numerous features now available at many telephone terminals, displays having selectable menu options are being commonly employed to aid users in accessing the features associated with these options. The display technology employed in most telephone displays today is character-based liquid crystal device (LCD) displays. These displays are configured in various array sizes such as, for example, a 2-line by 10-character LCD display, a 3-line by 12-character LCD display and a 4-line by 12-character LCD display. In order to be aesthetically pleasing when incorporated into a telephone housing, these displays tend to be small, typically on the order of one inch in height. Also, in order to provide a reasonable number of characters for information such as caller-ID information and directory access information, a small font size for the characters is generally used. Thus, the numerous available features unfortunately require large amounts of information to be presented on very small displays.
For optimizing the utilization of space on small displays, some telephone terminals use soft key user interfaces. While soft key approaches can increase the flexibility of managing access to numerous features, they require that a portion of the display be dedicated exclusively to this purpose. For example, many telephone terminals dedicate the bottom row of the display for presentation of label screen prompts which correspond to a set of hard keys. Although these screen prompts do improve somewhat the ease with which one uses the display, such a design constrains the amount of space available for presentation of non-menu items, and also constrains the number of soft key choices which may be shown at any given time. Further, existing terminal screen designs typically constrain the maximum number of characters available for menu labels.
The prior art problems are solved in accordance with the present invention which provides an arrangement for dynamically varying how space on a small display is allocated for presentation of various types of user information. This arrangement is more flexible in organizing and presenting information than existing arrangements.
In accordance with an aspect of the invention, the arrangement optimizes utilization of space on small displays by dynamically allocating lines on the display for presentation of status or header-type information as well as menu item-type information. The arrangement configures the display such that lines therein are dedicatable in any combination to displaying these two types of information. By way of example, on a terminal with a 4-line display, one line may be dedicated to status information, and three lines to menu items; or alternatively, two lines may be dedicated to status information and two lines also to menu items. Thus, enhanced flexibility and efficiency are provided through use of this arrangement.
This invention and its mode of operation will be more clearly understood from the following detailed description when read with the appended drawings: